Automate the Mundane workshop

Christine Doan and Seamus Campbell discuss the “Automate the Mundane” workshop – this Sat 6th Nov 2021

Christine Doan 0:03
Hi, everyone. I’m Christine Doan, I am one of the cofounders of Startup & Innovation Tablelands “ST” as we know it, because it’s too much of a mouthful. ST has gone from strength to strength, mostly in the last few years, due to the hard work of Seamus Campbell, who is now our ST Chair. And who’s always putting on another interesting workshop for us, always in the intersection of humans and IT. So Seamus, my first question is, in your advertising about this workshop, you’ve talked about stuff, and we’ve all got a lot of stuff like stuff is coming out of our ears. Stuff is everywhere. But what specific stuff are you going to help us with? If we attend this workshop?

Seamus Campbell 0:55
That’s actually a really hard question to answer. But basically, yeah, anything that you copy and paste from one programme to another. So if you get an email, and you copy the person’s details into a customer relationship management thing, or anything, where you copy and paste from one programme to another, we can usually automate, but also things where you’ve got a bit of a workflow. So say, I send you a suggestion for a workshop? Normally, what would happen is I’d send it to you in an email, you send it back to me in an email, then I’d have to go back and we go back for three or four times.

Christine Doan 1:39
And then you can’t find the thread.

Seamus Campbell 1:41
Yeah. Yeah. And you can see, what we’ve done in in ST is we use Slack, which is just a little mini automation tool that makes communication in intra team communication, so much more efficient. Workflows are a really good example. But things like if you get an email that comes in for your power bill, or your internet bill, how often do you lose that so you can move that somewhere else where it will be into a task manager or a calendar, where it’ll be easy to use and find.

Christine Doan 2:19
Right, and that happens automatically behind the scenes once you’ve set it all up, because that’s the idea. So if I were to think about the things that drive me crazy, I forget urgent emails, even the ones that I’ve flagged, I sometimes don’t remember, I have to look at my calendar over and over again, to make sure I’m not in my addled old timer rattled brain, forgetting something.

Seamus Campbell 2:43
Your calendar one, it’s easy within Google Calendar to send you a text x minutes before you’ve got an event or any other way you like being communicated by. Urgent emails, you can do something like when you mark them, Star them, you can send them somewhere, and you’d have to have something like a management system going, but you can have it so that again it reminded you and in your instance, you can even set it up so that once you started 10 minutes and 20 minutes before that event was due, you’d get a Slack, an email, a text. And work on the theory that one fo those would work.

Christine Doan 3:23
So yeah, that sounds good for me. So you integrate all of those aspects by putting some other pieces of software in the background and putting it to work. Is that the idea? Okay, so what are the expectations that people who are coming to this course? What What should they bring? What kind of problems should they bring along? And what should they expect out of the course?

Seamus Campbell 3:43
What I’d like them to bring along is anything that annoys them at work that they think could be done better? Now, creating social media posts is not really a very good category, because that’s the creative part of the human mind. Computers are not particularly good at creativity, but they are good at remembering stuff and moving stuff around. Whereas human beings are very good at creating, we’re not actually very good at remembering stuff. So that’s what I’d like them to bring to the meeting. And even if they seem silly, or impossible, just bring them along anyway, so we can discuss them.

Christine Doan 4:18
And so you’re going to you want people to come along with the expectation that if they bring a problem that is a part of their everyday workflow, you might be able to teach them to do an answer or or figure out how they could hire you to help them put these behind the scenes platforms together such that their work gets more integrated, and they have to remember less and their computer has to remember more.

Seamus Campbell 4:43
Yes, that’s exactly it. And I won’t necessarily be able to fix all problems, in the three hours we’ve got – I would like to put that upfront, but having said that, I’ll give them two bits of excellent software. They can start using them straightaway, they should walk out with a handful of things, they can use automations that they can use, and that they can start straight away. So you’ll be walking out with simple things like you just said, all social media, automation, things like that. So that’s what they’ll get. They’ll also get a free bonus session with me one-on-one for half an hour. That’s free and obligation free, as long as they register for the workshop.

Christine Doan 5:29
Cool. I registered. So me, I’m in. So, what happens if I miss, I’ve registered but what if I just missed the day? Because I didn’t have any automated software? Yes, we might get there.

Seamus Campbell 5:45
If you register, two things, you can join physically at the Tablelands Business Hub in Atherton, there’ll be a link underneath, you can join by zoom, there’ll be a link underneath for that. And if you can’t make it on the day, everyone who registers a) will get a recording of the whole thing. And if you register even if you don’t turn up, you’ll still get a free 30 minute obligation-free discovery-session with me Sat 6th Nov from 9:30am to 1pm

Christine Doan 6:21
Will you have some hot drinks and and and nibbles? Or does it is it sort of a BYO.

Seamus Campbell 6:28
I’ll have a small amount of drinks and nibbles if you want to bring your own.

Christine Doan 6:32
So feel free to bring your own, feel like it’s going to be a warm and friendly reception and feel like you’re going to walk out of there with something really important to you maybe one small thing but it might make a big difference to your business. And on top of that a free 30 minute session with Seamus to explore this further. That sounds like bonus and it’s free.

Seamus Campbell 6:52
It is, the whole thing’s free, which is pretty amazing. Got some funding to do this. Also bring your laptop that’s really important. All of this stuff is online. So you need to bring your laptop.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai